The 1990's decade has been marked by a societal technological revolution driven by the convergence of the data processing industry with the consumer electronics industry. Like all such revolutions, it unleashed a significant ripple effect of technological waves. The effect has, in turn, driven technologies which have been known and available but relatively quiescent over the years. A major one of these technologies is the internet-related distribution of documents, media and programs. The convergence of the electronic entertainment and consumer industries with data processing exponentially accelerated the demand for wide ranging communications distribution channels, and the World Wide Web or Internet which had quietly existed for over a generation as a loose academic and government data distribution facility reached "critical mass" and commenced a period of phenomenal expansion. With this expansion, businesses and consumers have direct access to all matter of documents, media and computer programs.
As a result of these changes it seems as if virtually all aspects of human endeavor in the industrialized world requires human-computer interfaces. Thus, there is a need to make computer directed activities accessible to a substantial portion of the world's population which, up to a year or two ago, was computer-illiterate, or, at best, computer indifferent. In order for the vast computer supported market places to continue and be commercially productive, it will be necessary for a large segment of computer indifferent consumers to be involved in computer interfaces. Thus, the challenge of our technology is to create interfaces to computers which are intuitive and forgive any impreciseness on the part of users. This is particularly needed with respect to the World Wide Web or internet. Users must be able to readily display documents in a clear and comprehensive manner in natural language. Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), which had been the documentation language of the internet World Wide Web for years, offered an answer. It offered direct links between pages and other documentation on the Web and a variety of related data sources which were, at first, text and then evolved into media, i.e. "hypermedia".
With all of these rapidly expanding functions of Web pages and like documentation, it should be readily understandable that the demand for Web documents has been expanding exponentially in recent years. In addition to the proliferating standard uses of HTML for text and media related World Wide Web pages for commercial, academic and entertainment purposes, there is now a Java documentation program, JavaDoc, which will produce standard HTML files for outputs to computer controlled displays to provide standard natural language displays of the program documentation. Thus, HTML has become the display language of choice for the Internet or World Wide Web. It is used there for all forms of display documentation including the markup of hypertext and hypermedia documents which are usually stored with their respective documents on an internet or Web server in addition to the above-mentioned program documentation functions. For further details on JavaDoc or HTML, reference may be made to the texts "Just Java", 2nd Edition, Peter van der Linden, Sun Microsystems, Inc., 1997; or "Java in a Nutshell", 2nd Edition, by David Flanagan, O'Reilly publisher, 1997.
With this rapid expansion of the Web, it is now possible for the Web browser or wanderer to spend literally hours going through document after document and accompanying media events in often less than productive excursions through the Web. These excursions often strain the user's time and resources. In order for the internet to mature from its great expectations to solid commercial fruition, it will be necessary for the internet to greatly reduce its drain on time and related resources. A significant source of this drain is in the Web page, the basic document page of the Web. In the case of Web pages, we do not have the situation of a relatively small group of professional designers working out the human factors; rather in the era of the Web, anyone and everyone can design a Web page. As a result, pages are frequently designed by developers without imaging or graphic skills. Which results in web pages that are often larger than the display windows or even screens on the user's receiving displays. This is particularly disrupting if the page is wider than the window since continual back and forth scrolling along the width of the page is required, and as the page usually contains text, such scrolling must be done line by line in order to read the text.
The present invention provides a solution to this problem by providing an implementation for positioning received pages in windows on receiving display stations so as to maximize the visibility of the information on the page.